While constitutional courts and international tribunals have traditionally dominated scholarship on human rights enforcement, legislatures play a decisive, yet deeply contested, role in shaping human rights outcomes. Rather than treating legislative bodies merely as passive targets of judicial oversight or potential drivers of majoritarian overreach, this panel examines legislatures as distinct, proactive institutional actors within human rights governance.
We invite paper proposals that investigate how legislative institutions—including parliamentary committee structures, legislative vetting procedures, human rights impact assessments, and inter-party mechanisms—interact with human rights regimes. The goal of this panel is to foster a pluralistic debate on the structural capacity, institutional willingness, and inherent limitations of parliaments in safeguarding or undermining human rights.
Within this broad framework, paper proposals might explore how specific institutional mechanisms and internal procedures operate in practice, questioning whether tools like human rights committees or pre-legislative vetting genuinely constrain legislative outputs or primarily serve legitimacy-seeking ends. The panel seeks to unpack the political motivations and internal parliamentary dynamics that drive these outcomes, examining how party discipline, coalition incentives, and procedural rules influence whether a legislature acts as a bulwark for rights or an engine of majoritarian overreach.
Furthermore, proposals may examine the broader institutional ecology, analyzing how legislative bodies navigate friction, competition, or alignment with judiciaries, executive authorities, and international rights bodies. We encourage contributions that investigate how varied regime types and constitutional designs reconfigure the structural capacity of parliaments to defend, neglect, or actively erode human rights norms.
This panel is intentionally open to diverse theoretical, normative, and methodological perspectives. We explicitly encourage submissions presenting contrasting viewpoints—ranging from institutional optimism to constitutional skepticism regarding legislative rights protection—utilizing qualitative, quantitative, or formal analytical approaches.